aptitude search patterns (was: Re: no router daemon?)

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

On Fri, Aug 04, 2006 at 16:37:10 -0700, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Friday 04 August 2006 11:14, Felipe Figueiredo wrote:
> > Le Friday 04 August 2006 14:41, dsr@tao.merseine.nu a écrit :
> > > On Fri, Aug 04, 2006 at 02:09:43PM -0300, Felipe Figueiredo wrote:
> > > > Hello,
> > > >
> > > > why is there no package for routed, or gated?
> > > >
> > > > Is there any package for a routing daemon?
> > >
> > > apt-cache search routing
> > > ...
> > > bird
> > > quagga
> > > ...
> >
> > This tells me not to search the cache with aptitude. It doesn't show any
> > results for 'route', nor 'routing'.
> 
> aptitude search whatever...  Same as you would if you used apt-get to do the 
> same thing.

If you run

aptitude search whatever

you will only find packages that contain "whatever" in their name.

You have to tell aptitude that you want to match your search pattern in
the package description by using the "~d" special pattern:

aptitude search '~drout(e|ing)'

I prefer apt-cache for simple searches of keywords since it is faster
than aptitude. The strength of aptitude's search lies in the fact that
it can do much more complex searches using special patterns and regular
expressions:

/usr/share/doc/aptitude/html/en/ch02s03.html

-- 
Regards,
          Florian